Game Booster – Increase game responsiveness with this nifty program!

Are you a gamer? Then chances are this program is for you. Game Booster works by disabling unnecessary background programs, defragging your game directories, and freeing up RAM. Here is a short description as per the developer:

Designed to help optimize your PC for smoother, more responsive game play in the latest PC games with the touch of a button, Game Booster helps achieve the performance edge previously only available to highly technical enthusiasts. It works by defragmenting game directories, temporarily shutting down background processes, cleaning RAM, and intensifying processor performance. That means you can keep all the features of Microsoft® Windows® Vista™ and XP® ready for when you need them, but turn them off when you are ready to get down to serious business – gaming. Game Booster makes it simpler to enjoy the latest games and take your experience to a new level. All systems go!

Game Booster will work on Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7, but in my experience the performance boost is only significant on Windows Vista (can’t comment on Windows XP, haven’t tested on that OS). Windows 7 already has a sort of Game Booster built into it which turns off unneeded features when launching full-screen applications such as games, so the increase in performance on Windows 7 is minimal.

For Vista (and presumably XP), on the other hand, the performance gain is superb. Vista is well-known as a resource hog, and Game Booster does an admirable job of freeing up resources and memory and allowing games to run faster. Operating the program is very simple. Once it starts up, you are greeted by the main menu, as shown here.

You can either click the Gaming Mode button and then you’ll be ready to play, or switch over to the Game Defrag tab and defrag a game directory to help it perform better:

Anywho, once you’re in Gaming Mode, all you have to do to return to Normal Mode is click the big, shiny button, and all the things Game Booster turned off will start back up quickly.

All in all, I believe it to be a very useful program, especially if you have Vista (or XP) as your Operating System and less than satisfactory equipment in your computer rig. Even if your computer is up to snuff, sometimes games are just too much to handle. For example, I have The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on my computer, and I love loading it up with dozens upon dozens of mods. After a while, this can start slowing down the game a bit (especially on Vista). I searched around and found Game Booster, and most of that extra lag caused by the mods went away. It works well, I recommend you give it a try.

wdhpr

I have been weary of using Iobit products in the pass. I was pleasantly surprised to find this product performed very well (winxp) especially since I recently acquired a 2tb WD external drive, its software is extremely resource hungry. Even though I can manually stop it via the taskmgr Game booster makes it easier and will shut down many other services that are not required. As Liam K stated also works well while working with other resource hungry applications and not just games.

Kinetix

@Jyo: Really? It detected Assassin’s Creed, Grand Theft Auto IV, and most of my other games right off the bat for me. Are you using 32 or 64-bit? That might cause an issue with detection, not sure though.

@Kraal FictionWriter: All the programs that Game Booster deactivates are safe to turn off. It isn’t like you’re using them anyways, if you’re gaming, and even then you can just turn them right back on with no harm done to your system. Don’t be scared of it, it works fine and hasn’t caused me any problems for all the times I’ve used it. ;)

Kraal FictionWriter

I never used it. I don’t know what services I can safely turn off, even for a temporary amount of time. Nor do I know which ones I would want to leave on.

I couldn’t find any information on it from the developer, and looking it up online brought me to places with a technical language I couldn’t quite understand.

I know, I probably haven’t looked everywhere. I figure though, my games don’t lag in any significant way.

Thank you for this program, though. Maybe someday I’ll know enough to make use of it. (And certainly in the future, when this computer is 8 years old and I still use it…it will /definitely/ come in handy!)

Jyo

I use it on my vista home laptop, and indeed it helps when I am gaming.

However, the game defrag tab doesn’t auto detect your games very well. You would have to point out its directory manually, since it only detects the default pc games, like hearts or solitaire or the preinstalled hp games in my case.

As for the xp OS, it didn’t do much for me. In fact, after I restored the memory from game booster (back to normal), it actually increased my RAM memory usage (compared to initially w/o the game booster).